In System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), administrators often monitor detailed job status to learn about the health and performance of operations and to diagnose any issues with the hosts or virtual machines.
To improve this experience, we are delighted to introduce you to the Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution, now available in Azure Log Analytics and as part of the Operations Management Suite (OMS). These solutions work alongside the System Center products to provide modern IT management scenarios, delivering simplified ways to solve and prevent problems.
Virtual Machine Manager Analytics is an open-source solution that can be included in your OMS workspace. This solution brings in the job data of your on-premises VMM instances to the log analytics in OMS. VMM admins can then use this versatile platform to construct queries for searching the relevant data and creating data visualizations.
The Virtual Machine Manager Analytics solution comes with some built-in reports with preconfigured data visualizations so you can easily get started with frequently used queries, such as:
- Distribution of failed jobs across VMM instances to easily scope down the broken instances.
- Distribution of failures over time to find sudden spikes, and to help with correlating the cause and failures.
- Distribution of failed jobs and errors to help with identifying the most error-prone jobs and the cause.
- Distribution of the job runtime across different runs to identify the sluggish and error-prone jobs.
These are just a few examples of the possibilities with Virtual Machine Manager Analytics. Because the solution is open-source, we are looking forward to contributions from the community for other data visualizations.
Further, the data from System Center Virtual Machine Manager can be combined with several features in OMS for compelling use cases, including:
- Bring together the jobs data from multiple VMM instances to a single OMS workspace. With a view, now you can keep an eye on job details for all your VMM instances together.
- Configure your OMS alerts with VMM jobs information to raise notifications for completion or failure of VMM jobs, and inform the appropriate teams.
- Correlate VMM job data with other events in OMS log analytics for faster troubleshooting of failures. You can easily identify the possible causes of sudden failures on a VMM machine by correlating the VMM job logs with information from solutions like Change Tracking and Hyper-V management solutions.
- Use Azure Automation runbooks with VMM job data to help enable automatic remediation for known or frequent issues.
How do I try this?
- Get a free trial of OMS.
- Deploy an Azure template for easy installation.
- Share feedback and tell us whatever is on your mind.
- Contribute (optional). It’s an open-source solution, so feel free to try it out and to contribute enhancements and ideas on GitHub (whenever possible).